MidwestLove Art & Design

Over the last year or so I’ve gotten to play a handful of shows with and get to know Zach Pietrini and the members of his band, The Broken Bones, an awesome Americana-flavored folk rock ensemble from the northern Chicago area. Formed around the songwriting chops of Zach, the latest incarnation of the band consists mostly of the members of the now defunct Ammi, another great band that I used to hang around and play shows with. For what it’s worth, I hope that my friends never stop making music. I don’t know what I’d do with myself.

Anyway, The Bones wanted this release to evoke an organic, illustrated and woodsy feel, which is totally appropriate for their sound. My wife (and fellow Venna band mate) Heather was asked to sing back up vocals on this project, so I was fortunate enough to hear the songs from their rough demo stage to the final mixes. Being so familiar with the project gave me a good sense of what to do with their packaging. I definitely wanted to give it little more character apart from the standard brown paper bag your average folk-rock tends to come in. Apparently to me, that means anthropomorphic mice and snails marching their way through a thicket.

The final product was the result of a few different ideas that culminated into a number of sketches, most of which ended up getting thrown out. The project really only started taking shape once the band settled on the title The Bright and Shining Lights: of Anywhere Else. I ended up sketching out the main front cover foliage as one drawing. I then inked each “layer” of foliage sperately on tracing paper and then scanned and layered them in Illustrator. The individual layers were then digitally painted in Photoshop. Phil of The Bones put it best when he described it as having a Don Bluth-ish quality (a fantastic compliment by the way… thanks, Phil). It actually does remind me of The Secret of Nimh, which was an unintentional but definitely welcome outcome.

Here’s the full outside Digipac & full process disc face-

These are being printed up by the always reliable Sooper Dooper up in Madison, WI. They do a great job and I can’t wait to get these back.

Leave me some comments… let me know what you think!

-marky

The Chairs, a truly excellent and fairly prolific young band from Appleton, WI had already put out a 12 song full length, and two digital EPs this year when they approached me about doing some custom, special-edition type packaging for a short run of physically released copies of their upcoming full length. The album was to be called “Nine Ways”, featuring nine songs each revolving around a character meeting his or her end. Thus, lead singer and primary songwriter Alex Schaaf suggested we adhere to the theme of “nine ways to kill a man” for the cover art.

Since we were doing custom packaging on a short run scale, Alex also thought it would be cool to approximate the look of an actual hardcover-bound book containing the disc and liner notes, rather than the typical CD jewel case and insert. An awesome idea that I was totally down for. My first thought was to order a small quantity of actual blank books and silk screen the covers, but that proved to be cost prohibitive. So in lieu of that, I figured we could raid the thrift stores and libraries for old used books that we would then re-cover… in essence we would make “book jackets” for our used books like your teachers made you do in high school for your textbooks. And, since the album was basically nine separate stories and we were going to be printing and assembling the covers ourselves, I decided to do nine individual covers, each one visually representing the method of fatality described in a different song.

The covers were first sketched out as overly stylized, almost comical representations of the subject matter. But as I got into the painting of them, it turned out that they needed to be more realistic in order to not make the project look silly. They were all painted digitally, which was my one regret. I wish I would have had the time or the budget to do them on actual canvas. On the whole, I think they turned out pretty great and they go together well, and the band was happy with them which is always the most important thing. It was hard for us to pick out a favorite to use as the standalone cover for online and digital use, but we ended up going with “drowning” in the end.

You can view the rest of the covers at The Chairs website here.

The album itself is incredibly catchy, cleverly written avant-pop loaded with charm and dark humor. I would strongly recommend checking it out for yourself as it is definitely one of the most promising local releases I’ve heard this year. You can also download their past stuff here, most of it for free. What’s not to love about free.

Let me know what you think.

-marky

UPDATE 11/2/09 -

The guys in The Chairs were nice enough to send me a sample copy of one of the books, so I got some pics for you to check out. Here you go-

Sorry for my lag in posting lately. I have been unbelievably busy, and this posts is only coming at the exchange of sleep, seeing as it’s 2:30 in the morning. Carrying on with business…

Awesome little pop-punk band from Chicago The American Autumn wrote an eight song EP full of catchy, lovable pop songs hopped up on mall food court sodas and PBR called Do You Like Me? Yes/No/Maybe. They asked me to draw some stuff for it that didn’t have anything to do with passing notes. This left me in a bewildered state for about 2 months while I pretended to know what I was going to do. In the end it turned out all right, as I came up with an idea that was mildly ambiguous but still along the lines of “Do You Like Me?”. I figured, if I kept it bright and heartwarming it should be ok.

This project consists of pages of old vintage paper from my wife’s grandfather’s journal, some vintage typewriter keystrokes also provided by my wife (who should probably have gotten some sort of artist-assistant credit in this project) and this little bear and bird that have been hanging out in my sketch book pages for a while. I had really been wanting to find a project to properly draw them for, and they just happened to fit nicely into the concept for this EP.

Ah yes, the concept… mostly, I just wanted to get across the idea of “adventuring off of the pages that we’re drawn onto”… or something lofty (silly?) like that. So, I drew the little explorers venturing off to sea and whatnot and eventually saying goodbye. I had a few other illustrations of them, but there was limited space in the layout so I had to just choose the ones that I liked best. All in all, I was pretty pleased with it and so were the American Autumn guys… who are awesome guys, by the way. Check them out.

Let me know what you think!

-marky